ABSTRACT:Software engineering is an data rich activity: changes to source code are recorded in version archives, bugs are reported to issue tracking systems, and communications are archived in e-mails and newsgroups. The Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) group at Microsoft Research analyzes such data to better understand various software development issues from an empirical perspective. In this talk, I will highlight our research themes and activities using examples from our research on socio technical congruence, Xbox game analytics, bug reporting and triaging, and data-driven software engineering. I will highlight our unique ability to leverage industrial data and developers and the ability to make near term impact on Microsoft via the results of our studies. The work presented in this talk has been done by Chris Bird, Brendan Murphy, Nachi Nagappan, myself, and many others who have visited our group over the past years.

BIO:Thomas Zimmermann received his Diploma degree in Computer Science from the University of Passau, and his PhD degree from Saarland University, Germany. He is a researcher in the Empirical Software Engineering Group at Microsoft Research, and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. His research interests include empirical software engineering, mining software repositories, software reliability, development tools, and social networking. He is best known for his research on systematic mining of version archives and bug databases to conduct empirical studies and to build tools to support developers and managers.

He co-organized an ICSM working session on Myths in Software Engineering (MythSE '07) as well as workshops on software defects (DEFECTS '08 and '09) and recommendation systems in software engineering (RSSE '08 and '10). He received two ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards for his work published at the ICSE '07 and FSE '08 conferences. He has served on a variety of program committees, including ICSE, ECOOP, ISSTA, and the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys). He was co-chair of the program committee for MSR '10 and '11. His homepage is http://thomas-zimmermann.com